


love will tear us apart (again)

by theexistentiallyqueer



Category: Persona 5
Genre: 2/2, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Confessions, Getting Together, M/M, Making Out, Morgana is in this but he doesn't play a big role, Not Beta Read, The title is kinda misleading, just my typical levels of pretension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29526123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theexistentiallyqueer/pseuds/theexistentiallyqueer
Summary: Maruki plays his ace in the hole, never expecting that Akira already knows.The punchline is: Goro never expected that either.(2/2 B Side, or: the AU where Akira figures out what his "wish" is before the deadline.)
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 26
Kudos: 332





	love will tear us apart (again)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm here, fifteen days late! I started this in January and had hoped to have it finished in time to post _on_ 2/2. Well, you know what they say: better late than never.
> 
> Some of the emotional beats and characterization in this are inspired by MistressEast's 2/2 fic, [nails (on fingers, in coffins)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26783749). It's one of favorite third semester fics, but it's E rated and an omegaverse AU, so mind the tags before you read.
> 
> Title from the song "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division.

None of it is remotely suspicious—except, of course, for all of the many ways in which it is.

First is waking up in the detention center on Christmas: breath misting in the chilly air, how strangely the sensation of his lungs expanding had struck him, as if his body were out of practice. Then the slow crawl of time through the week that followed into the new year, like sinking into molasses, into quicksand—the renewal of the sun melting red into white—all of it as profoundly unsettling as an itch is that returns no matter how hard you scratch it, ragged nails breaking skin and drawing blood.

Survival necessitates the cultivation of two qualities: clinical skepticism and a healthy expectation of disappointment. The one feeds into the other as naturally as force, acting on mass, causes acceleration, and Goro has plenty of fuel to burn in that fire.

Which is why, on the ninth of January when he and Akira face down Maruki for a second time and Maruki presses Akira to accept his offer, Goro _doubts_.

Maruki possesses as much mastery of manipulation as any other two-bit villain Goro has encountered; he can see as clearly as Goro can the tightrope that Akira walks, resolute justice counterbalanced against the savior complex weighing him down. Goro sucks in a sharp breath in that tense handful of seconds and thinks, viciously, spitefully: _Don’t you_ dare _fall_.

Akira looks up towards Goro and meets his hard stare with his own, calculation lancing through the stormy haze in his cloudy grey eyes. His mouth twists in that moment, and Goro, illusory clockwork heart thundering in his ribcage, can’t divine what that could possibly mean.

“I won’t accept this reality,” Akira declares, turning back to Maruki, and the moment snaps in two: the before and then the after. The mounting tension crescendos in the maelstrom that follows.

The cavalry arrives afterwards just in the nick of time, because of course it does. Joker, Joker, Joker: ever the Yoshitsune to his men.  
  


* * *

It is not strictly paranoia that drives him to stand outside Leblanc’s door the evening before their deadline, although it’s certainly something close. He can’t shake that visual metaphor from his mind: Akira on a tightrope, torn between perceived obligation and righteous vindication. That, and the marrow-deep terror at the prospect of being, once more, the object of another’s dominion.

Goro stands outside the entrance to the cafe, the supple leather of his glove meager protection for his skin as he digs the fingers of his left hand into the brickwork. The chalkboard easel has been folded up and tucked away, leaving a clear space beside the doorway where Goro can eavesdrop, unseen through the glass-paned front door. Here he can hear the quiet rise and fall of voices coming from inside the cafe—or, more specifically, the soft cadence of Maruki’s voice as it hooks a spindle into his lies and drops them, whirling them into yarn like a pendulum. Threading doubt through the eye of a needle and stitching it under Akira’s skin.

At the sound of his own name Goro tenses, his empty hand clenching into a fist at his side.

“Won’t you join us, Akechi-kun? This involves you too.”

Tossing his tightly-woven line into the water.

“Akechi?” The cat’s voice, high and perplexed. “What about him?”

Goro inches sideways, resting one hand on the handle of the door.

And Maruki, reproaching gently: “This affects him as much as—maybe more than—it affects either of you.”

The tackle hooks into the folds of Goro’s scarf and winds him in.

Since his release from detention Goro has only been back to Leblanc for business, and every one of those meetings had filled the little cafe with the Phantom Thieves’ motley colors and raucous noise. Now, nearly empty and quiet enough that the simmer of water in the kettles is audible, the improbable, pervasive sense of homeliness that saturates every cubic inch of space within its walls reasserts itself, settling over Goro’s thoughts in a soft cotton fuzz that he pushes violently away.

“It seems I’m expected,” he says, curling his lip as he looks down his nose—at Maruki, who doesn’t balk at the venom in Goro’s stare. “Or has your god complex gifted you with omniscience now too?”

“Call it a hypothesis, if you like.” Maruki scratches at his cheek and gives a disarming smile. “One you’ve just proven true.”

The rage simmering in the pit of Goro’s stomach flares hotter, boiling up his throat before he shoves it back down. Maruki certainly doesn’t seem surprised to see him here, unlike Morgana, and as for Akira—

Akira’s expression is as qabalistic as Goro has ever seen it, empty of the slightest tell. He quirks an eyebrow at Goro when he catches Goro staring, but Akira is ever a cypher and Goro has never managed to fully crack the key.

Morgana breaks the crackling tension by hopping on the table, his tail drooped but lashing. “What does that mean? Why did you expect Akechi? How does this affect him more than us?”

Saintly Maruki gives a sad little smile; it’s a nauseating sight to swallow.

“In my line of work you get to see the different ways people relate to one another, and no two relationships are the same. But I think—I think the relationship that the two of you share—Kurusu-kun, Akechi-kun… It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

“You’re enemies, but you’re not. You have every reason to hate one another, but you don’t.” Maruki leans back, folding his hands together and resting them against his belly. “What you two have is special. I hope you realize that.”

 _Disgusting._ Goro can’t resist rolling his eyes. “Spare us the melodrama. All I have is a desire to smash this delusional dreamland of yours into pieces.”

Maruki sighs.

“That’s a shame.” He shakes his head, like he truly means it, like this whole production was ever about Goro’s feelings on the matter, as if the performance isn’t being staged entirely for an audience of one. “And what about you, Kurusu-kun?”

Hook, line, sinker; anxiety knots in the space beneath Goro’s diaphragm, a writhing mass of invisible centipedes.

Akira meets Maruki’s earnest gaze and stares impassively back. “What about me?”

“Don’t you have regrets about how everything ended between you and Akechi-kun?” Maruki entreats, his reasonable voice never wavering.

Goro sways forward again, every joule of kinetic energy radiating through his tense frame, an earthquake of the body.

“No,” Akira says. Just one little syllable, but it ripples through the air like a shockwave.

Maruki can only stare.

“No,” Akira repeats, dragging his pink tongue between the delicate bowline of his lips. “And respectfully, I’d appreciate it if you’d just say it out loud.”

Maruki blinks, caught halfway between alien perplexity and genuine incomprehension. “Say what?”

Akira leans forward; the delicate, glass-like hum in the air creaks warningly, groaning under pressure.

“What you’re implying. No more of this dancing around it, sensei.” Akira rests his elbows on the booth table and leans forward, resting his chin on interlaced hands. The warm yellow lamps reflect off the lenses of his glasses, turning them into two bright round mirrors. “What went down between me and Akechi. Exactly _how_ did it end?”

There’s something steely-tempered in his tone, something flinty flashing in his eyes; Akira’s mouth forms the words and Akira’s throat gives them voice, but it’s Joker who’s doing the talking. Every word he utters crashes into Goro’s awareness, a volley of arrows breaking the surface tension before sinking into water like stones. Goro came here tonight with a specific set of expectations, but now he finds himself recalibrating whatever formula he’d been using as the variables change in front of him at the speed of sound.

Maruki must be realizing the same thing, because for the first time he looks off-kilter, just the slightest bit uneasy. “That’s….Kurusu-kun, please. I would hate to dig into fresh wounds. Let’s not be—”

“Oh, no, Doctor.” Goro huffs softly, inching forward. In some dark corner of his mind he can hear Loki’s seesaw laughter: Goro reaches for him and pulls every savage note of that ancient malice into his own voice. “He asked you a question. Now: your answer.”

Pinned between two scalpel-edged stares, Maruki pauses to assess them. The man is not stupid, Goro will credit him that much. Caught between the one hand guarding against the cat and the other hand guarding without it, Maruki has only one bid to make against his superscendant competition: the promise of utopia, against all else.

“Akechi-kun died in Shido’s palace,” Maruki says softly, the corners of his eyes pinched with a grief that has nothing to do with them. “I saw it all happen. The only reason he’s here, Kurusu-kun, in this reality, is because you wished for him to be by your side.”

The anxiety dragging its needlepoint nails across the angles of his ribs pauses, shivering, then lances suddenly through the intercostal space into the tender flesh within. Akira meets Goro’s eyes, and Goro grasps desperately for the muscle memory of how to breathe.

 _Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. Don’t you_ dare.

“Yeah,” Akira says, his voice soft the way phosphorus is soft. “I knew that already.”

The air, fractured along so many fault lines, shatters.

* * *

The bell above the door chimes cheerfully in Maruki’s wake. Having escorted the man to the door, Akira turns back to face Goro, but absent any sort of impending threat he only stands here, tugging anxiously at a loose curl and not meeting Goro’s eyes.

Goro, for his part, is reevaluating what this means for him—or for this fictitious version of him—or for whatever future version of him may or may not, might or might not exist.

The facts, so far as he knows them:

On Christmas Eve Goro had found himself, with no prior recollection of how he got there, approaching Akira in the middle of the crowded Shibuya Scramble. He’d spent the following week in the juvenile detention center rotating between interrogation rooms and his small cell, staring at walls and trying to pluck some sliver of memory from the gaping blankness stretching from that December night back to the ghost of pain lancing through his diaphragm and the crack of a gunshot ringing in his ears. Released, then, after the start of the new year—illogically, inexplicably—only to find that the dead were up and walking and the world had lost its collective mind.

When he stepped through Leblanc’s front door that morning and his gaze moved from Isshiki Wakaba, to her daughter, to Akira himself, it hadn’t been hard to draw the obvious conclusion, disquieting as it was: Goro was dead and Akira had wished him back to life. Inconceivable. Embarrassing.

He’d thought, all this time, that Akira wasn’t cognizant of that fact—only now to learn that he’s known, if not all along, but for time enough to brace himself for Maruki to weaponize it against him.

Is that it? Or is the truth of the matter that Akira’s affection is yet another one of Maruki’s delusions? A trick of the light, an illusion, a thing that doesn’t exist and never did.

Goro isn’t sure which possibility he prefers is true.

“Mona.” Akira’s voice cuts through the quiet. “Can you give us some time?”

“Of course.” Morgana, blue eyes darting with visible concern between them, uncurls the tail coiled elegantly around his feet and stands. “I’ll go visit Futaba. You can text her when you want me to come back.”

“Thanks.”

The cat leaps from the table and makes his way to the stairs—to slip out the attic window, presumably. One paw lifted over the first step, he pauses and looks back.

Akira smiles. “We’ll be okay.”

Morgana’s whiskers droop, but he takes the reassurance at its face and darts away.

Leaving Goro alone with Akira and all the unsaid things between them.

“I’ll start,” Goro says, landing the first blow on his own terms. “How long have you known?”

Akira breathes in, then exhales, bracing himself like a man staring down a charging bull.

“Since we got Sumire out of the palace,” he says, “though it took me a couple of days to be sure. But when Maruki made his offer that day, I thought—he kept talking about everything he’d done to make my friends happy, made me go see them with my own eyes so I’d know what they stood to lose, but he never once talked about what I got out of this reality, or what you did.”

“Yes, it’s clear he hoped your martyr complex would be enough to sway you.” Goro sneers.

Akira looks away. “It wasn’t _like_ that.”

“ _It wasn’t like that_ ,” Goro mocks, pitching his voice as low as he can force it to go. “And so, knowing the truth, you simply decided once more to make this decision for me. I admit I didn’t expect you to actually place any value on my life, but I had thought you would, perhaps, be sincere in your motivations.”

Akira sucks in a breath. “That’s not—”

“Not what? Be honest, we both know anything Maruki claims is horseshit. The man can’t get over losing his girlfriend, so he finds, in you, the perfect subject to project all his woes onto.” Goro relishes the way Akira flinches at that and continues on, viciously: “ _Saint_ Kurusu, looking for the perfect cross to martyr himself on.”

His voice has manifested its own will now and it charges forward, sketching aloud in words the picture coalescing so clearly in his mind.

“Taken at face value, it certainly looks plausible that what Maruki says is true. That you _wished_ for me,” Goro spits. “ _Absurd_. Upon closer examination the holes in his argument become clear. None of this was ever about what anyone else _wants_ : this reality is a dollhouse, we are _toys_ he gets to play with, and he gives us what he thinks we want to satisfy his own desires by proxy.”

Akira opens his mouth, as if to say something, but Goro charges on a head without giving him the chance to start.

“The idea that Maruki would even know what _you_ , of all people, want—” Hysteria bubbles up Goro’s throat; he can’t help the hiccup of laughter that escapes him. “He looks at you and sees only himself, like _everyone_ looks at you and sees themselves! You’re just a fucking—some kind of fucking mirror, showing people what they want to see but giving nothing of your own away—”

His throat constricts, his vision blurs. Goro blinks rapidly against the haze but the cafe is suddenly five times brighter, light catching and refracting in the wetness gathering in his lashes. Crying, he realizes, incredulous, he’s crying— _I’m crying?_ Another burst of laughter, another pained hiccup catching in his chest where scar tissue from the bullet he took should be.

He feels, rather than sees, Akira lurching forward and crowding up against him. One moment Goro is a lone island in a cold room and the next the blazing furnace of Akira’s body is pushing into him, enfolding him, crowding him against one of the tables and giving Goro something to anchor onto.

“Akechi,” Akira murmurs, hands painting soothing arcs down Goro’s arms, up his back, across his shoulders—touch, constant, alien, succor and secure. “Akechi, Akechi—”

“Shut up,” Goro hisses, furious at him, furious at both of them, “shut up, I hate you so much—”

“Akechi,” Akira says again, his breath hot on Goro’s ear, and that’s what makes Goro shudder. That’s what makes him fist his hands in the fabric of Akira’s jacket and pull Akira up to kiss him.

It’s indelicate, inexpert. Awkward and messy. Goro loses track of time for a moment, loses track of where he is or who he is, the entirety of his brain narrowing its focus down to the warm press of Akira’s lips, the slick, hot press of Akira’s tongue invading his mouth, the painful hunger of Akira's fingers digging into his hips, crushing Goro bodily against him. With a whine, Akira pitches forward and pushes Goro down into the booth behind him, bearing him down into the worn leather seating until Goro is on his back, dizzy, sucking air into his lungs with desperate breaths and Akira is straddling his lap and carding one hand through Goro’s hair, the other rubbing gentle circles into the tense swell of Goro’s shoulder.

Goro comes back to himself in fits and starts, grounding himself in each point of contact and expanding his awareness out from there. The ugly knot of unease in his chest starts to pull its thorny threads back in, if not unravel entirely. And with the reassertion of reason comes the embarrassing awareness of Akira’s weight over him, the lurking, ghostly pressure of Akira’s tongue in his own mouth, the taste of him lingering.

In the edge of his vision he can see Akira’s tongue moving now, tracing across his lips to wet them. The sight sparks something in Goro’s thoracic cavity. He’s felt that tongue in his mouth; he can’t help but imagine it everywhere else now, too.

“Okay to talk?” Akira’s voice, as he asks, is hoarse.

Goro tries to reply, but he can’t connect his own voice to the words—he settles for curling two gloved hands around Akira’s wrists and squeezing.

“Right. Okay.” Akira sucks in a breath; his exhale stirs little flyaway hairs around Goro’s face, tickling his skin. “I wanna be clear about one thing: your life,” he says, “is important to me. Your life is the single most important thing that exists in mine.”

It’s an absurd declaration; Goro’s heart staggers under the weight of it. Akira stares down at him, radiating intensity, brow furrowed and silver eyes gleaming. Goro has to look away, fixing his eyes on a scuff in the red leather upholstery, so that Akira’s words don’t drown him.

“After Shido’s palace,” Akira confesses, “I couldn’t remember how to breathe. Physically, I was fine, but it felt….wrong somehow, weird, like being trapped underwater. Everything spinning.” Gentle fingers brush Goro’s hair away from his face, trace the shell of his burning ear. “I kept looking for you, _everywhere_. I thought I was going crazy. And then I saw you on Christmas and realized it was _you_ and you were _real_ , and I realized what that feeling was. It was like I’d been trapped in a free fall with no end in sight, only I finally had solid ground under my feet again."

“Akira—” Discomfort twists in Goro’s stomach, forcing him to look up and meet Akira’s eyes. With a start he realizes that Akira isn’t wearing his glasses, and then he realizes that he _hasn’t_ been wearing them. Since when? Since at least just before their breathless, desperate fumbling. Stripped of any masks, Akira’s naked face is openly, achingly sincere. “I’m _not_ real. You know that, you have to know that. That’s the entire point.”

But Akira’s eyes are blazing. “You know that painting that hangs by the door?” He points his thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the portrait that looks suspiciously similar to the very one Madarame sold fraudulent copies of to fund Shido’s campaign. “We took that from Madarame’s palace. Yusuke’s mom is the one who actually painted it. Madarame stole it from her, changed it, told everyone it was his.

“Earlier this month,” he continues, fingers returning, undeterred, to stroke Goro’s hair, “during that first week in January, I went with Yusuke to an art gallery in Ueno. That painting, the same one that’s hanging up here now, was on display there, under his mom’s name. That was part of Yusuke’s wish. But when I got home, the night we got Sumire out of the palace, it was here again, hanging on the wall like it had always been.”

“I don’t see—” Goro stops, but Akira cuts him off with a level look.

“The _Sayuri_ came back, but Wakaba disappeared. Haru’s dad, Makoto’s dad—gone, as if they’d never been there.”

The heart beating at the center of Goro’s simulacrum body thuds a little harder.

“Meanwhile, I’m sitting here thinking about all of this, and we’re going to the palace every day, and I’m starting to realize that there’s a reason I was always awake when no one else was. I was never dreaming in the first place.”

Akira’s weight on his thighs starts to feel more and more like an anchor.

“So when I started thinking about what _I_ was supposed to get out of this reality Maruki made, I was stumped. We were in the palace, taking ten in a safe room, and you and I had just piledrived a Fafnir. I was still coming down off the adrenaline high. And I thought, _that’s weird, I already have everything I want_.”

Goro’s heart shakes against the bars of his ribcage.

“That’s when it all clicked, and just like that the adrenaline was gone. It was like how I felt in December, like my lungs were operating at half-capacity. I looked at you, and all I could think was _fuck_ , just that word on repeat, waiting every second for the other shoe to drop. But nothing happened.”

Akira sets his other hand on Goro’s chest, palm flat against the fabric of his jacket. He presses down, hard enough to almost hurt, but certainly just hard enough to feel Goro’s heart thundering in like a hollow drum.

“You’re here,” Akira says, leaning over him. “You’ve always been here. You made me a promise, and we both know you’re too stubborn to die.”

And just like that, Goro knows he’s been outwitted once again.

But as he wraps his arms around Akira’s shoulders and pulls him down to kiss him again, he can’t say he minds losing to Akira one more time.

* * *

The third of February dawns, cold and unforgiving.

Goro wakes slowly, awareness rising to the front of his mind slowly like the tide. The room is chilly, but the bed’s heavy comforter embraces him like a cocoon, catching and trapping the heat of the two bodies curled beneath it. Goro blinks his eyes open, gaze unfocused, to find Akira already awake and watching him.

“What?” he asks, voice hoarse from sleep.

Akira gives him a small, giddy smile. “Nothing. I like waking up next to you. It’s nice.”

It’s the kind of comment artfully crafted to make Goro flush, and already he can feel the tips of his ears burning.

“What time is it?” he asks, not giving Akira an inch of ground.

“Almost 7. We’ll have to get up soon.”

They will. There’s something they have to do today.

Downstairs, Sojiro is behind the bar, prepping the cafe for open. He lifts his eyebrows but only bids them a gruff good morning, gesturing to the two mugs of coffee already set out on the counter, giving off aromatic steam. Goro curls over his mug, leeching the heat of it into his bare hands and taking long drags of his drink until the lingering edges of sleep start to fall away from his brain.

When he’s finished he sets his mug down, tipping his head back with a groan. Under the table, Akira kicks one fuzzy-socked foot into his shin.

Goro slits open one eye to glare at him. “Stop that.”

Akira stares back at him, lips pressed together in mirth. “Don’t fall back asleep in the booth or you’ll get me kicked out.”

“Good. Then you can get a real apartment.”

Akira kicks him again.

“Enough with the roughhousing,” Sojiro reminds them pointedly. “I have a cafe to run. If you two have places to be, get going.”

“Yessir,” Akira salutes, while Goro ducks his chin in apology.

In the bathroom, Goro snags his toothbrush from the medicine cabinet while Akira ties back his hair. Goro doesn’t need the fussing, particularly not this early in the morning, but Akira’s fidgety hands are frequently drawn to Goro’s hair like magnets.

“What?” Akira asks innocently as Goro straightens up, staring at him pointedly in the mirror.

“Nothing,” Goro says, but he leaves the ponytail in anyway.

“Where’re you two off to today?” Sojiro asks as they’re on their way out the door.

“Odaiba,” Goro answers, one gloved hand resting on the door handle.

“Going to see Sumire,” Akira explains. “The others will be there too.”

“Right. Don’t cause any trouble.”

“We’ll be fine,” Akira reassures him.

Goro lifts a hand in goodbye and pushes open the door, Akira half a step behind him. As they walk into the icy morning sunshine, Akira slips a hand in his, matching glove to matching glove, and Goro feels reality coalesce around them.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who cheered me on and supported me as I struggled with this. I don't know why I had such a hard time writing this!!!! Focusing is hard these days, but I persevered. I don't consider this a "fix it" fic, per se, because I don't think there's much about the third semester that needs fixing, and certainly not 2/2. But I had fun playing around with this little "what if" scenario. Akira getting the upper hand is always fun.
> 
> Major props to [Corvus](https://twitter.com/impropercorvus) for drawing my attention to the state of Sayuri in the third semester. While I remembered it being in the museum, I didn't realize it's actually not hanging in Leblanc during the first several days of January, but it's returned to its regular place after Yusuke breaks free of Maruki's actualization.


End file.
